The Threateners (12 page)

Mac nodded. “You’re aware that the man you knew as Mark Steiner, who wrote under the pseudonym of Marcus Piedra, was actually Raoul Marcus Carrera Mascarena, scion of a fairly prominent Peruvian family. After all the political upheavals in the area they are not as outrageously wealthy as they used to be, but they could still afford a good U.S. education for young Marcus. It didn’t please them, however, when he left Harvard to study journalism in Columbia, Missouri; they wanted a Harvard MBA in the family to manage their remaining interests profitably. And they certainly did not applaud when he began investigating the various South American drug combines for different publications, and publishing his findings. I do not believe his family was actually involved with drags, but in those countries there’s an elite that continues to exist by accommodating itself to power according to certain rules, the main one being: one survives. One does not antagonize the dictator, or the junta, or the generals, or the drug lords. One does not necessarily make friends with them or entertain them socially, one may disapprove of them, one may even sneer at them in private as crude peasants, but one does not go out of the way to attack them publicly as Marcus did.”

It seemed strange that now that he was dead, I was getting to know more about the man I’d called Mark Steiner than I’d ever known while he was alive. I’d been aware of his Latin origins, of course, but his English had been good, and as I’d told him, it isn’t something you pay much attention to in New Mexico, where half the people you meet have the same accent and ancestry. I’d wondered what he did for a living, but I’d never got around to asking, perhaps because I hadn’t wanted him to ask me the same question. It had surprised me to learn that he was a writer; it had surprised me even more to discover that he was kind of a celebrity.

I said, “I don’t suppose his family was any more enthusiastic about his marriage than about his career; they’d undoubtedly have preferred to welcome a high-class Peruvian girl into the fold. However, families tend to be kind of clannish down there, and you can’t kill one of them, even an unpopular one, without taking a big chance of starting a blood feud.”

Mac said, “Mrs. Steiner made the same point, indirectly. She seems to feel that she may be able to get some useful assistance from her relatives by marriage and their contacts in other South American countries, now that her husband has been murdered, even though they disapproved of the marriage while he was alive.”

“Useful assistance in doing what?” I asked.

He said, obliquely, “Like many modem households, the Steiner menage included a personal computer. I gather it was used entirely by the lady, mostly as a word processor. Steiner wrote his stuff on an old portable and she transcribed it on her machine, which used the small three-and-a-half-inch computer disks—I believe they are also called diskettes. Mrs. Steiner says that knowing that he was in danger, whenever he finished a certain number of chapters of his book, he would have her copy them onto an extra disk, encrypted a certain way—I gather many computer programs have provisions for such security measures. He would then put the disk into a protective mailer and send it to a friend in South America, a different friend each time. Apparently these friends were not given the access code or password that would let them read the disks; they were simply asked to keep them safe.” Mac shook his head grimly. “While Mrs. Steiner thinks she can remember the names of many of her husband’s South American friends, she has no idea which of them he trusted enough to look after these precious fractions of his magnum opus. Incidentally, she says he sent the last one off last week; the book was finished, except for an appendix he was working on, and of course the final revision and polishing.”

I said, “You’d think Mark would have kept a master list to remind him, if he should need them, which chapters he’d sent where.”

“He probably did,” Mac said. “It was probably hidden somewhere in the house; but you saw the house.”

I had certainly seen the house, although getting to it had taken some doing. The first contingent of cops that had descended on me had been bound they were going to arrest me for something, since there was nobody else for them to clap their cuffs on—nobody living, at least. And I was the man whose house had been blown up, whose lady friend had been killed, whose dog had been so hopelessly injured as to require euthanasia. Naturally, by police logic, I had to be guilty of something, if only of the heinous crime of self-defense, since there were a couple of extra stiffs lying around.

It had taken me a while to persuade them to take me, under escort, to 22 Butterwood Road on the south side of town.

When we got there, we found firemen pumping water onto the black, smoking, roofless shell of the house I remembered. The fire had been hot, quick, and obviously of incendiary origin. Later, I learned that it had not been merely a matter of tossing a couple of firebombs through the windows; a car had driven up and two men had managed the front door somehow—a passing jogger, thinking little of it, had noticed that one had carried a husky catalog case and the other had seemed to have trouble finding the right key—and had gone inside and spent some time there before coming out again; the fire had erupted a few minutes later. No electronic circuits or disks could have survived the heat that had obviously been generated, and I learned later that no fireproof safe had been found in the ruins. At the time I hadn’t known that I was supposed to be interested in electronics.

“There were a couple of little girls,” I’d said, looking at the hoses pumping water into the smoke.

My police guardians weren’t interested in little girls, but a nearby cop glanced our way.

He called down the street: “Hey, Art, bring those kids over here.”

Another uniformed man led them up to us. They were dressed in grubby jeans and T-shirts. The smaller girl had been crying, but the older one seemed to be very much in control of herself.

“You know these kids, mister?” their guardian asked me.

I said, “Hi, Andy. We talked on the phone.”

She was skinny and had short blond hair and a pert face with wise blue eyes made wiser by a pair of large horn-rim glasses that made her look like a small edition of her mother. The younger one was slightly plump, with a pretty baby face and long brown hair down her back.

The older one said, “You’re Mr. Helm. I saw you when Popsy brought you to the house that time.”

I hunkered down on the sidewalk in front of her. From my own long-ago papa experience, I remembered that kids, like dogs, are best approached at their own level.

I said, “Andy, I’ve got some bad news for you. Your daddy’s been hurt.”

Her big eyes watched me gravely through the glasses. ‘ ‘He’s not our real daddy, but we like him, ’ ’ she said, sounding like the chairman of a committee of two that had given the matter serious consideration. Then she asked calmly, “Is he dead?”

I nodded. “Yes, Andy, I’m afraid—”

At which point we were interrupted by a shrill female in a police uniform who accused me of being a sadistic brute, breaking the news of their bereavement to these helpless kids in such a crude and cruel manner. Considering that the helpless kids in question had fled one country ahead of its government’s execution squads, had had their mother kidnapped in another country, and had just made good their escape from a home that had been torched, I hadn’t felt they needed to be shielded from bad news, but perhaps I’d been wrong. Then Dennis Morton turned up and laid claim to them, saying he’d take them to the rest home where their mother was staying. The kids were marched away between him and the policewoman, who was making cooing, sympathetic noises at them. I saw Andrea Steiner look back, and I thought she winked at me, but I couldn’t be sure.

"Useful assistance in doing what?" I repeated, when Mac didn’t speak. I looked at him hard. I said, “So Ruth Steiner is going down to South America to retrieve some information about pernicious substances that’s on computer disks her husband sent to various friends, a whole book of information; and you want me to go along and hold her hand.’’

“Yes, the lady has indicated that she will not cooperate with the organization that employs Dennis Morton, but she will with us. Rather than try to persuade her to change her mind, the powers that be have instructed us to protect her in her travels and give her any assistance she requires.”

I studied him for a moment. I didn’t need to ask why, when he’d always managed to keep us clear of antidrug operations in the past, saying that he had no intention of risking good soldiers in a lost war, he’d allowed us to be roped into this shaky mission. There were two answers and I knew both of them. First and less important: Dennis Morton’s superior had tried to give Mac hands-off orders, and he doesn’t take kindly to being leaned on, so he’d wangled instructions from higher authority that let us take over the whole operation, and to hell with Morton and Co. But that was personal and of minor significance. More important was the feet that something needed to be done in South America, and as Ruth Steiner’s bodyguard I’d be in a good position to do it.

I didn’t need to ask, but to get things perfectly clear, I asked anyway: “We don’t usually mess with the drug-interdiction business, sir. What’s changed our policy, the threat of the nation being inundated by a flood of nickel marijuana and dollar cocaine?”

Mac said, “You’re being willfully stupid, Eric. You know perfectly well that prohibited substances, or whatever the current jargon calls them, are not the real problem here.”

I said, “Okay, I just wanted to get the priorities straight. What does my official brief include, if anything, beyond keeping the lady alive? I mean, are we interested in her damned diskettes?”

“Not particularly. Now that her husband is dead, they, and the book they represent, belong to the lady, as far as we’re concerned. Of course, since we’re required to protect her, we cannot allow her to be robbed by
anybody
, if you understand what I mean, Eric. We have jurisdiction. No one else has any right whatever to Mrs. Steiner’s literary inheritance. You are entitled to use any means at your disposal to defend it." He stared at me hard for a moment to make sure I got the message:
If any other government agency tries to horn in, blast them
. Then he went on in softer tones: “If you should gain the lady’s confidence to the extent that she’ll entrust the disks to you, which doesn’t seem likely at the moment, and she gives her permission, you can pass them along to us; but under no circumstances are you to antagonize her by trying to take her property against her will. I repeat, we are not particularly interested in obtaining Marcus Steiner’s literary revelations.”

I spent the afternoon in the basement with our armorer, having the theory and practice of Thuggee explained to me, since it seemed likely I hadn’t seen the last of Vasquez’s stranglers. The following morning I caught a flight west to Santa Fe—well, to Albuquerque; you have to drive the last sixty miles—so I could fly east to Miami two days later with Ruth Steiner.

It would have been simpler for me, already on the East Coast, to meet her in Miami, but although I didn’t really expect action to be taken against her so soon, I didn’t like the idea of letting her cross the country without me. Besides, we needed a little time together to develop a working relationship before we joined the tour group that was supposed to give us a bit of camouflage through South America.

As I now sipped my Scotch in the cocktail lounge of the MIA Hotel and nibbled at the Brie, which was satisfactorily ripe, I reflected that you had to hand it to the Thugs. Who would suspect you of being lethally armed just because you carried a slightly oversized silk handkerchief in one pocket and some change in another that could be knotted into one comer for weight—four or five quarters would do the job nicely, I’d determined. But airport security in Albuquerque hadn’t given my most visible weapon a second look when I emptied my pockets at the magnetic gate; it had been just a fancy bandanna to them. They hadn’t spotted the invisible ones, either; but then, they never do. Of course, arrangements had also been made for our local people to slip me a firearm in any country where I felt the need for one.

Ruth Steiner spoke after a little while. “I’m sorry if I seemed stuffy about your drinks.”

I hadn’t expected an apology. “Forget it. ”

She shook her head. “No, you’d better know that my first husband, the father of my girls, was an alcoholic. ” She drew a long breath. ‘ ‘He was in the wrong car when he was blown up. Nobody’d bother to booby-trap our old wreck, Richard’s position wasn’t that important—he wasn’t that important, which was one of his problems—but he got so drunk at an official cocktail party that he staggered out and got into the wrong car by mistake, the one beside ours. It belonged to a visiting politico who’d earned a certain amount of hostility. The parking attendant had left the key in the lock—there was supposed to be perfect security on the premises, ha-ha!—and when Richard tried to start the car . . . Boom!" She shook her head. "They weren’t very nice years, those last ones with Richard. Watching someone you once loved very much become somebody no one could love . . . Ever since, it gives me the creeps to see anybody drink, particularly someone I may have to rely on. Mark . . .” She stopped and cleared her throat. “Mark was very sweet about it after we were married. He liked an occasional whiskey, and particularly wine with dinner, but he knew how it made me feel, so he abstained.” She smiled faintly. “Of course I knew he kept a cooler of beer in his truck and had one occasionally, but never when I was around. Not because he was afraid of me or what I’d say; simply because he didn’t want to distress me. A very sweet guy.”

Watching her, I remembered the first time I’d seen her, in the kitchen of their home, a slim, neat—well, except for the intentionally untidy hair—and rather plain girl in an inexpensive print dress, spreading peanut butter for two kids who didn’t look much younger than she did. Today she was traveling in a striped blue knit shirt, a little faded-denim skirt, nylons, and low blue shoes. A blue cardigan, insurance against airline air-conditioning, hung over the back of her chair. She wore no eye makeup, and her eyes were big and blue behind the oversized glasses.